(first posted 3/3/2013) Despite its name, the Lumina failed to bring any light to those dark years at GM when it arrived. The Lumina was a desperate effort to play catch-up with Ford’s runaway hit Taurus as well as to parry with the Camry and Accord; the result was predictably dim. It instantly joined its smaller brother Corsica as the very icons of fleet queens, a title its W-Body successors defended right to the present. Did they have redeeming qualities? Undoubtedly; but I’m hardly the one to ask. Try Hertz.

On the West Coast, the only lots where one would see these was at Hertz and Avis; Chevy dealers didn’t even bother to stock them. And selling any Chevy with “Euro” plastered all over it to a Californian in the early nineties would have been a heroic feat indeed, after years of pushing the Eurosport Celebrity. Fool me once…

Chevrolet was obviously looking at the Taurus when it designed the Lumina, but if they’d taken a closer look, they might have noticed that Ford totally dispensed with any hokey marketing efforts to make the Taurus seem more “euro”. It was just “Taurus”, at least until the SHO came along, and its badging was notoriously stealthy.

Actually, Ford was probably more worried about the opposite: that folks would think the Taurus was genuinely too euro for conservative American tastes. In any case, it didn’t rely on pretense to badge and sell them , even in foreign-car besotted California. Or especially so.

GM’s W-Body started out as the GM10, which got off to miserable start with the 1988 Buick Regal, Olds Cutlass Supreme and Pontiac Grand Prix coupes. The whole GM10 program was quite likely the single biggest boondoggle of the Roger Smith era; their development cost a mind-boggling $7 billion ($13 billion adjusted), and the goal was to build these cars in seven plants at 250,000 units per year per plant; in other words, a 21% share of the total US market. What were they smoking? Soon enough, GM would be fighting for a 21% market share for the whole company, never mind mid-sized cars.

The enormous sunk costs and subsequent pathetic sales meant that GM was losing some $2000 per car on these at the time the Lumina made its belated appearance for 1990. The old saw that GM lost money on its small cars because it had to build them to meet CAFE targets isn’t nearly encompassing enough. When asked by Fortune why GM10 was such a catastrophe, Smith replied, “I don’t know. It’s a mysterious thing.”(wikipedia)

Meanwhile, Ford was probably making that much (or more) per Taurus, which they were cranking out around the clock at their very cost-efficient Atlanta plant. If the Taurus is considered the car that “saved” Ford; the Lumina and its ilk were the ones that destroyed GM’s critical high-volume mid-sized passenger car business. Oh well; there were plenty of Tahoes and Suburbans to keep the lights on in “the tubes” for a while longer.

It’s ironic that the W-Body has ended up being the most enduring of GM’s platforms, given its painful birth. The 2013 Impala is the last of the line, and its replacement is coming on line as we write this. Needless to say, GM found plenty of ways to improve the breed and wring out production efficiencies over its 25 year lifespan. In some ways, it almost hertz to see it go. What will the car rental experience be like without a GM W-Body awaiting one at every airport?

Before you leave a comment about how wonderful and reliable Aunt Mildred’s Lumina was, please remember the cardinal rule of GM’s Deadly Sins: it’s not about auntie’s car per se, but about the undeniable facts of the impact that each Deadly Sin had on the slow but steady erosion of GM’s market share, reputation, and contribution to its final demise. There’s no doubt that many Luminas gave good service to their owners; much more so than to its maker.

The one way that the Lumina was decidedly different from the Taurus was in offering a coupe body style. Well, Ford had the RWD Thunderbird, although it pulled off a rather GM-esque boner with the MN12 that arrived in 1989. After spending peanuts on the Fox-body aero-bird, Ford grossly overspent on its replacement, and struggled with its profitability. Nothing like success to breed expensive mistakes.

Typical for many (but hardly all) new GM cars, Lumina sedan sales started off reasonably well in its first year, with some 278k sold. That’s far off from the Taurus’ romp in the sales stats during its heyday, and it was to be the best Lumina year ever. If one were to break out retail sales, the numbers would be even less competitive. In its last gen1 year, 1994, sedan sales were down to a mere 76k. No breakout of “Euro” versions, but lets just say that the gen2 Lumina was noticeably lacking that evocative name.

Lumina coupe sales were always much smaller, which perhaps explains why the gen2 version cynically was given the Monte Carlo name. That didn’t exactly set its sales on fire, but who would have thought otherwise? Presumably someone did.

Since we’re intimating at performance in all this heady Euro-talk, let’s spell out how the Lumina lived up to its Euro-ness under the hood. Standard engine through 1992 was the decidedly un-European Iron Duke 2.5 four, now called (low) Tech IV. It sported balance shafts, TBI injection, and 110 hp. Take that, Honda! Oops; wrong country/continent. The the 3.1 liter 60 degree Chevy V6 was optional, rated at 135 or 140 hp. Thankfully, the notorious leaky V6 intake manifold gasket was still under development in GM Labs when these Luminas were built. No wonder there seem to be so many gen1 Luminas still on the streets. Have they earned Cockroach of the Road™ status?

image: wikipedia

Not the legendary Lumina Z34. An ambitious effort to turn the pedestrian pushrod V6 into a high-tech wonder with DOHC four-valve heads along with numerous other changes, turned it into a 210 hp snake pit. It quickly developed an iffy reputation; good luck finding one still running anymore. Even routine maintenance, like timing belts and spark plug changes were quite expensive. The Euro name finally means something, although not used on the Z34. The LQ1 ended up having a short six-year lifespan; 1997 was its last year. Another ambitious, expensive GM effort that fell short in the long run. GM was getting really good at that.

It may have said “Euro” on its flanks, but you’d never know it after opening the door. It was about as all-American as it got; that dash somehow even manages evoke the one in a ’63-’64 Chevy.

But the Euro did come with a firmer suspension and fatter tires, contributing to some of that genuine euro-feel behind the wheel. Like most GM cars of the era with upgraded suspension, its chassis tuning was optimized for best results (car magazine test skid pad numbers?) on relatively smooth pavement. Hustle one through some rough-and-tumble pavement, and things start to feel more American than European.

Door handles integrated into the B-pillar were hardly paragons of ergonomics. Some might just say plain awkward. Others, worse. Must have seemed like a good idea at the time. At least one hopes so.

We haven’t said a word so far about the Lumina’s styling. I suppose one should be charitable towards the low belt line, which at least gave it good visibility. It did make it look like the whole car had been chopped a bit, with the passenger compartment riding low in the saddle. But for the most part, it exuded lots of the GM innocuous smooth-flat-clean-dullness that was so much on display at the time. Forgettable.

Which pretty much sums up the Lumina. Who wants to dwell on the idea of it and its GM W-Body stablemates selling at the rate of 1.75 million units per year? The quicker forgotten, the better.

142 Comments

I had a 1996 Lumina as my first car. So many people I know had one of these. We looked at a 95 with the 3.4 motor. It leaked oil like crazy and our mechanic said he doesn’t even touch them. Nor did the local Chevy dealer…

I made the mistake 😉 of using the email that goes to my BlackBerry for the CC updates. I woke up about 7am and I usually check the BB to make sure there are not any emergencies waiting for me and saw this update. Well Portland is -3 hours EST so you can do the math. That and everyone’s comments are set to PST.

Call me crazy, but I’be always secretly lusted after one of these, especially in the “Euro” or Z34 trim. I am absolutely smitten with the clean, angular lines of the car, it seems to be moving whilst standing still. I think, for the Z34 package, instead of the dohc critter under the hood, there should have been either the 2.8 or 3.1 from the Cavalier Z24 shoved in there. Add a supercharger and a six speed and GM would’be had a hot little package there. With proper suspension and wheels/tires, this car could’ve been pretty fun to drive . Make mine a sedan please, and since I’m dreaming, rear wheel drive. 3-series chaser, anyone ?

Most of the W-cars were built with the 3.1s in those years but they are larger and heavier than the Cavaliers, other than the 3.4DOHC, there wasn’t a larger V6 available in the early 90s except for the 3.8 Buick V6, which indeed found its way into W cars towards the end of that body’s cycle. The last true original Ws like the Grand Prix DID come with the 3.8 Supercharged V6 but no manual was ever offered. I had a 2001 Buick Regal GSX for a while that was a really fast midsize car for its time.

Why couldn’t GM ever make these have a proper stance? Like so many GM fwd cars of the time, it came from the factory sagging in the rear (even the four door in the Disney cross-marking ad is sagging). I don’t see how they could feel good sending a slouch like that out the door.

Actually these cars are pretty hardy beasts overall if you stuck to the tech IV or 3.1 V6. I still see 200-300k survivors on a regular basis come through our dealership now and again. The dual galvanized bodies held up longer than an A-body could ever think of doing in the salt/snow belt of Upstate, NY as I still see 93-94 examples running around with a minimal amount of cancer.

Any chance you could tell me if I can get into the car through the trunk? I have the keys, however, the drivers door handle has been broke and this winter I broke the passenger one(it was frozen) and I been reading lots of stuff but still not sure if the seats will come out or fold down. Its a 1993 chevy lumina z34

I’ve always wanted to drive one of these Eurosport variants to see how well GM had allowed the engineers to sort it out. I recall driving a friend’s ’91 base Lumina on an interstate road trip years ago. Even compared to the Cutlass Supreme my parents owned at the time, the steering felt loose and watery, and damping was marginal at best.

I think the W-body hit its apex with the Grand Prix GXP of 2005-2008. That was a legitimately sweet car to drive–and if if had sold in greater numbers, might have been remembered as atonement for this Deadly Sin.

Don’t bother. It was all a flash package. Badging and perhaps a different engine. I read somewhere that the Eurosport version of the Celebrity (that the Lumina replaced) cost GM a grand total of $1.25 difference from the standard Celebrity. But of course they could charge $500-1000 for that Eurosport package that was nothing more than trim differences and a few badges. They did absolutely nothing to the suspension tuning or engine in the Celebrity at least. If you check any parts books (Napa, O’reilly, etc) for any parts of a GM Eurosport model, you will never find that designation listing a different part number over the base model. They didn’t even try with the Euro packages.

In reality, like Paul said, the “Eurosport” had a stiffer suspension but they used the crappiest, cheapest suspension parts they could get away with. The bushings were like concrete and the ride on anything less than mirror smooth pavement was rough and harsh to the extreme. In fact, the base models drove better, this being a relative term for a car that didn’t drive very well.

In 1995, as college was winding down for me, I test drove a new Monte Carlo Z34 and a MN12 Thunderbird. Both brand new, 1995 models.

The Monte Lumina’s dohc engine made good power, but the interior was atrocious. The leather seats had air holes and the texture and color made it look like large areas of band-aid material. It just had a general overall cheap feeling to it.

On the other hand, the ‘Bird felt more cohesive, better planted, more comfortable, and much higher quality. It’s 4.6 is also a paragon of reliability.

I wish I did. It was black, leather interior, with the sport suspension that was basically the Super Coupe suspension (it was canned at the end of ’95, I believe) with factory 16″ wheels and the 4.6. Great car.

These were truly horrifying vehicles- possibly the some of the worst styling ever. When I squint my eyes, I can still see a little of that “floaty” looking long front overhang on the outgoing Impalas, which, apart from that, are decently styled vehicles..

Even a Corsica looks nice parked next to one of these!

The APV/dustbuster vans also could be fitted with some of the Euro styling cues, though I don’t remember if they got the actual Euro badge. I saw one at the junkyard yesterday with the red pinstripe and blacked out trim.

Back in junior high, one of the carpool moms had a Lumina sedan. Dark red with wheelcovers and a black luggage rack, and a red interior. Even at that age, I remember thinking Mom’s Caravan was a cooler ride to be seen in. And that wasn’t a thought I had very often!

Currently, I have a company-car that is a 2011 Malibu. While I wouldn’t buy one with Camry money, I am pleased to see how far The General has come. Though, I’m not sure the 2013 Malibu is an improvement.

Hehe. This dialogue made me laugh. I do own a new(ish) Nissan (2012 Altima) and find it atheistically pleasing in a non-offensive kind of way. More cohesive looking than the subject Lumina, in that it’s style flows and looks consistent, but similar in that it’s not a very memorable look.

More funny is that I traded in a 2011 Malibu for it, which was a lemon that I couldn’t wait to be rid of. Although, believe it or not, the Malibu had the nicer interior. But the Altima (and an older design of the Altima at that) drives way better than the Malibu. The 4 cyl Malibu drive train, it least the one in my car, had no redeeming qualities. No performance, bad driving dynamics and bad gas mileage. Now, we owned a Saturn Aura (same car) with the 3.6L which we loved except for it’s gas mileage. So I probably would like the V6 Malibu, which in true GM fashion, just got replaced with a 4 cyl. So all in all, I’d say that the General is still hit and miss with their new cars, but they are definitely making nicer interiors.

My experience with the lumina was, naturally a rental. Actually its not bad in a basic transportation kinda way. And I was impressed by its heater, much, much better than the one in my Maxima. Also, it’s cool that you can seat three in the front bench seat. But unfortunately, the competitions were better, nearly all of them. How the GM development managed to output such a dud with such a lavish development budget is indeed a mystery.

That’s exactly HOW GM got where it is; and why I for one am content to leave it to die in the gutter.

It’s not abandonment to the elements, so much as it is a well-earned tortuous death. Cheap, I can understand. Ramblers were cheap. Valiants were cheap. But to squander that kind of budget making a Valu-Time Generic CAR…without even a rugged underpinning…slow and fragile and bland and marketed as if the customers were idiots…GM’s Executive pool should have been taken out to be shot along with the corporation.

My uncle Tim owned a first year W-body Cutlass Supreme sedan, an anniversary edition Cutlass Convertible with the DOHC 3.4V6, and now has a Monte Carlo SS from near the end of production. I should ask him how he thinks the W body evolved through those years.

That’s funny, MY uncle Tim owned a first year W-body Cutlass Supreme, but in coupe form. Grey with basket weave wheels, I thought it was pretty good looking at the time. IIRC it developed electrical problems north of 100k and he donated it. Last W-body for him though, he had a couple of Bonneville SSEs after that and by the 2000s was leasing a new car every three years. Mostly CTSs and Lacrosses.

The early ’90’s were some of the darkest years of my life, toiling as a traffic manager at an old school (picture an old brick building with nearby smokestacks) manufacturing concern. Blech!
I would regularly be taken to lunch by carrier reps and one in particular had a new Lumina. American cars were completely off my radar at the time but I remember thinking that it was smooth and quiet ride in that ’70’s way I remember from my youth. As we made our way to the local El Torito, while stopped at a light, the engine just cut out not to be coaxed back to life. No lunch time burrito for me. Fail.

Ah, good ‘ole Roger Smith, the ultimate GM bean-counter pariah and poster boy for GM bashing. And the GM10/W-body Lumina is such a great example of the ‘pinnacle’ Smith reached during his ten-year tenure at the helm of GM (the longest of any GM CEO). As pointed out, the Lumina just screams “rental car”. It’s the automotive equivalent of a straight to DVD movie.

It’s tough to say “well, Ford had the Thunderbird” as an excuse for the 2-door Lumina when Chevy still had the Monte Carlo. Maybe if the 2-door Lumina didn’t look so much like a big Beretta. OTOH, if the 2-door Lumina had looked better, it would have undoubtedly cannibalized Monte Carlo sales.

And that interior. Only Chrysler’s interiors can compare in general crappy plastics and cheeziness. Although, unlike both GM and Ford, at least Chrysler managed to come up with a decent solution to the ‘passive seatbelt system’ (didn’t they just go with airbags from the beginning?). Ford used motorized ‘mouse belts’ and GM had the whole seat belt apparatus in the door, ostensively so the driver/passenger could get in and out without unbuckling. Did anyone ever really enter/exit this way?

Even my ’88 Accord DX hatchback had it; the “feature” was added for that model year to comply with Fed. passive-safety requirements. It & the inconvenient oil-filter location (facing the firewall) were the *only* things I disliked about the car, but I parted with it after 16 yrs. (~150K miles) to make room for our Sienna. I fear I’ll never find a better Honda.

I had an 89 Accord coupe back in HS. It had the same door mounted seatbelts. If you dropped off a passenger, and they unfastened the seatbelt to get out of the car, you either had to re-fasten it, or listen to the warning beep until you stopped/re-started the engine.

Seat belts have had an interesting history – I have a 93 Century wagon I use about the house for dirty jobs – that has that arrangement. I dug the bell out of the dash so all I get now is the red light on the dash until I buckle up.

When shoulder belts first came out, they were like two piece design with the lap belt and did not retract but you hung them up on the roof of the car above the door. That was before my time but always thought that was unusual.

The worst of all time has to be the 1974 interlock system that would prevent the car from starting unless the seat belt was fastened. I am not against safety but that was a bad design.

jpcavanaugh

Posted March 3, 2013 at 11:24 AM

The pre-74 separate shoulder belts almost never got used, in my experience. It was enough work getting people used to using lap belts. Almost every 1968-73 car I ever saw had those shoulder belts neatly tucked into their little roof clips, untouched by any human hands since their installation.

I agree on the interlock. My mother and stepmom each got a new 74 car. Before I got a drivers license, it was my job to move the car into the garage for the evening, if it had been left out. My workaround was to lift my butt off the seat to start the car, then suffer through the buzzer as I parked it. When the interlock law got repealed, one of the car mags published instructions on how to disable the system, which I did about 9 seconds after the magazine showed up in the mail.

The 1974 Chrysler belts were the worst. Instead of the inertia reel used by GM and Ford, the Chrysler system sensed the belt pulling out too fast and locked it. Putting on those belts in a Mopar was a sloooooow process. If you got impatient, the belt would lock up halfway out, and you had to reel it back in and start over. I think they switched to the other system by 1975 or 76.

CraigInNC

Posted March 3, 2013 at 11:35 AM

I pitched a story to Paul about doing an article on airbags, but something on seatbelts might be fun. Times have certainly changed not just on seat belt usage but also in how they were designed.

As recently as 2000 we had an old timer with a 74 Cadillac Coupe deVille we thought had a problem with the interlock relay when we couldn’t get a hot wire in the starter circuit.

The most interesting belt-in-door design has got to be the motorized ones where you were supposed to leave the seatbelt buckled and the motor drew the belt away so you could get in and out.

Marko

Posted March 3, 2013 at 6:56 PM

There were three basic designs:

1. One belt, both anchors on door (GM, a few Hondas and Nissans)

2. Two belts, shoulder belt with anchor on door and manual lap belt (VW, Hyundai, according to Wiki)

The most pointless setups were ones with both automatic/passive belts AND airbags. (Subaru SVX, Nissan Quest, heck, probably some W-bodies)

Interesting/useless trivia: In 1993, ye olde VW Cabriolet (dating back to ’80, and based on the ’75 Rabbit) had a driver’s airbag, yet the brand-new MkIII Jetta/Golf had a door-mounted passive restraint without an airbag, and the relatively new EuroVan had no “passive restraint” at all! (Truck/SUV loophole, which may very well have contributed to the rise of SUVs.)

Yet by the end of the MkIII’s run in 1998/1999, it had both dual front AND side airbags available. (The annoying belt was gone, of course.) I can’t think of another car that went from having a non-airbag “passive restraint” to having 4 or more airbags in the same generation.

My 89 Escort GT also had the horizontally mounted, pointed at the firewall oil filter. Directly over the exhaust pipe. No matter how many cloths I used, it always smoked and stank for an hour after each change.

For me the problem with the Lumina is that the 3 boxes do not look as if they belong together. I’m willing to believe the front and rear boxes belong together, but there is no way either belong with that box in the middle.

Speaking of C&D, WRT to the G1 dash, Pat Bedard quipped that nobody wants to daily reminded of how ease of assembly was the main factor.
As many know, the dash was assembled with an upper and lower half, with the seam clearly visible.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned that huge rear spoiler, which to me is the signature of this car. And not in a totally bad way, though I always wondered how much water the trunk lid would hold after a rain. But I think the end-to-end length has to be some kind of record.

I inherited a 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix LE when grandma stopped driving. I drive it daily from Lansing to Kalamazoo then later daily to Grand Rapids (Michigan). The car inhaled highway miles. I liked the orange digital dashboard. All in all a decent car (had the 3.1) with few problems.

In the early ’90s, I drove Toyotas and worked for a bank with several Crown Vic’s in its fleet of company vehicles, along with one first-generation Lumina and one second-generation Camry. The Lumina and Camry were acquired at the same time.

The Lumina was the only available vehicle when I pulled a two-week stint in New Orleans, working on an acquisition of a failed S&L. After about two years of service, the Lumina had the lowest mileage among the fleet – less than half that of the Camry – a little over 20,000 miles, if memory serves me. I’m not sure if the low mileage was due to being frequently out of service for repairs, or simply avoidance of the Lumina in favor of other cars in the fleet.

My recall of the two weeks was that of utter cheapness. I unlocked the door, pulled up on the handle and felt NOTHING – it was as though the door was still locked. It dawned on me that there was no tactile feel to the door latch; you had to pull on the handle and pull HARD to open the doors. The controls mounted to the steering stalk felt as though they wanted to snap off in your hand. The seats were like sitting on marshmallows.

The crowning achievement was when I was driving after dark from a bank branch on the wrong side of the Faubourg Marigny – NOT a good part of town – and the lockup torque converter decided not to unlock as a came to a stop, stalling the engine. I was literally sweating bullets as I threw it back into park, cranked the ignition switch and prayed it would restart…and continued the routine of stopping, stalling, and restarting at every stop light between there and my hotel on Poydras.

After returning that piece of garbage to the fleet manager and telling my story, it got a new transmission (under warranty) and within a year or so it was traded for a newly-introduced Dodge Intrepid, which was surprisingly reliable.

I owned a used 2nd- gen Lumina for a year back in 2002, and I couldn’t agree more with your assessment of the interior. Without a doubt one of the worst interiors of any car I’ve been in — it just screamed cheap in so many ways. As it aged, the dash became even more mis-aligned than when it was new. By the time I sold it, the AC compressor went, half the dash lights were out, the cigarette lighter stop working, the headliner was sagging, and only one power window was operational.

Here in the rust-belt, it seemed that every other Lumina you saw sported a low-hanging rear emergency brake cable with a rusted piece of metal attached to it ( which I assume was attached to the body at some point ) that looked like a metal clothespin weighing the cable down even lower.

My dad bought a first year Lumina Euro sedan in light blue. It had the spaceship-looking hubcaps instead of alloys, something that disappointed me to no end as a 10 year old. They were stolen pretty quickly, only to be replaced with KMart specials. As an early teenager my favorite thing about that car was parking it on the street (about as far as my dad would let me drive it) opening the trunk, blasting some hip-hop and playing basketball with my friends. The 6x9s in the rear deck actually put out a lot of bass. They didn’t have great tonal range, but what 14 year old gives a crap about tonal range? The exhaust tuning on the Euros was also quite throaty. I loved it because I thought it “almost” sounded like a V8 (it didn’t at all), but as it aged it started to sound just plain loud. Strange decision for a family sedan.

The car was fairly reliable for the five years and 75k that my dad had it, but just as he was getting ready to sell it it developed a rod knock. Even as a rabid GM fanboy, I could tell that this car was not a great effort, mediocre on all fronts.

I always find it funny how people who decide to modify base Mustangs and such always futility aim at duplicating a V8 rumble with a thousand dollars worth of LT headers, high flow cats(or deletion), mandrel bent X pipes, mufflers ect, ect, only to sound like a the typical ricers they lament anywhere off idle. Meanwhile, these and the A bodies, with no modifications at all besides neglect, sound more wicked than some V8s.

redmondjp

Posted March 4, 2013 at 12:38 AM

Yes, that 2.8l had a unique sound that I could hear coming from a block away, with a 99% accuracy rating!

I don’t hear it any more, however. I was walking today and marveled at how incredibly quiet most of today’s cars actually are – the loudest thing is the tire noise!

GM’s W-Body started out as the GM10, which got off to miserable start with the 1988 Buick Century, Olds Cutlass Supreme and Pontiac Grand Prix coupes. The whole GM10 program was quite likely the single biggest boondoggle of the Roger Smith era;

What’s this?! A GM DS article that I totally agree with? That hasn’t happened since the Bonneville G.

Except for the part about ’88 Century. That one was still A-body in ’88 and didn’t go W until much later.

I did like the stylings of the Grand Prix of this era. But the Chevy lineup just had an air of cheapness about it as you gazed into or sat into one of those interiors. Cheap feeling fabrics, plastics, carpets and headliners, Cheap feeling and cheap looking switches and gauges. For me, the design was equally uninspired. If you saw a Corsica, well, you knew the Beretta as well as you were familiar with the Lumina and earlier, the Celebrity. Just dull and uninspired was this Lumina.

It was right here that you knew GM could not soldier on putting out a product like this for long and get away with it. It was this era, right here, that laid the groundwork for their later bankruptcy. It was hard to believe that this was the same company that once made a 65-70 Impala and Caprice, the Chevelle, the Camaro, the Corvette and Blazer.

That photo of Roger Smith is fitting here. The man himself laid the groundwork for the modern day well paid corporate CEO who single handedly destroys an Old Line American Company. The Michael Moore movie Roger and Me documents well this era for GM and what these corporate incompetent bean counters did to our automobile industry.

Though Smith is no saint, i’ll give you that, lets lay a little blame on the grand Ol UAW, you know, they guys that would show up for work drunk and stoned, hide behind parts to nap, then wake up, get a little more drunk and stoned, thow beer caps into places where they couldn’t be extracted from cars to create permanent rattles, all the while continuing with the “screw the company” attitude…

Tell me you can screw together something like a car while you’re wasted? Tell me when the quality of cars started to go downhill quickly? Right around the time the ME/Peace/love and understanding over coddled baby boomers started to get into the work force, in the 70’s right around the time the WWII generation started to retire, coincidence?

We like to sit there and point at GM and laugh at how it has “fallen” all the while not noticing that the rest of the country has gone down the same toilet.

I am no great friend of the modern UAW, but we must acknowledge that they were building some pretty high quality cars (high initial quality, at least) for Ford and Chrysler in those years, two companies that were picking up market share as GM was shedding it.

Must be one of those well kept secrets, though the UAW was also building the H-body Buick LeSabre which was I believe was the highest ranked domestic car in initial quality for 1990-1991, inspite of the UAW.

CraigInNC

Posted March 3, 2013 at 11:53 AM

Most of that crap happened in the 70s. From WWII era until right about 1970, labor relations were decent if not good and cars were generally assembled adequately. It was when the Big 3 started making a lot of changed to the way things were done things began to unwind. Plus the 1970s seemed to be a decade of restlessness in most workplaces and it was the mood of the times.

With that said, the UAW has little to do with the design of a car and largely is unaware of what they are going to build until it gets close to time of plant production. Corporate guys get the blame for all the eggs that get laid including the W cars. There are plenty of exceptionally well built cars that don’t sell well as there have been many wildly popular cars that have had so-so reliability.

That is why I have always believed that the reliability angle is overplayed as the most important reason why GM fell from having 50% of the market to 25%. Ironically reliability generally improved during that time period so there had to be other reasons. PRODUCT, if you make something people want, they will buy it, often lumps and all. (That’s the only reason how I can explain the continued sales of Land Rovers which are consistently at the bottom of most reliability studies…)

The Lumina and the other W cars were radically different expensive (to make) cars that were uninspiring but were at least as reliable if not better than the models they replaced. My uncle’s father who owned an Olds dealership until 1996 always believed Olds was lost because of the poor reception of the Cutlass and the 88/98. They were not ‘bad’ cars, but they alienated their existing customer base yet failed to attract new ones.

Lt.BrunoStachel

Posted March 4, 2013 at 3:10 PM

+1!

You’re talking about the UAW. Unless Ford and Chrysler had a different union that I’m unaware of.

BTW I have quite a few friends that are still in the UAW or who have either retired. I really wouldn’t lay the entire blame on the work force. I would blame the union leaders and GM’s executives with the total slide down hill.

Carmine, one cannot argue about what our baby boomer generation (of which I am one) has wrought on this country. The adverserial relationship between management and labor contributed greatly to the poor quality and overall lame effort of some of these cars. But one has to acknowledge the corporate mentality that looked at every component in saving dollars and cents instead of making the best car for the money. It was also during the timeframe of the Lumina here that the teachings of Dr Deming was propelling the Japanese into automotive manufacturing supremacy. All while the UAW was hand picking which American company to target next for their latest grievance.

I’d like to know what car Roger Smith drove, if he had a passion for his Corvettes, Trans Ams, Z28’s, Z24’s or if he just viewed the car as nothing but a 4 wheeled appliance that should be marked up for maximum profits…

Worth pointing out the Deming Method. Ford, in 1984, interally knew their quality wasn’t quite on par with the Japanese makes, and management made it a top priority to improve. By 1986, Ford had gone all-in on the Deming Method, going so far as to bring the man himself to the company (I removed probably 20 different Deming tapes from the video archives while I was there).

And I think it shows in the results Ford had in the 1980s versus GM. My impression is that Ford, around 1982, really got religion after losing over 1.5 Billion (one of the largest losses in the entire corporate world recorded at that point) in 1980 and another Billion in 1981. All the materials I’ve ever seen suggest that they did some deep soul-searching and realized they needed to be building the best. (I also wonder how much Henry II’s stepping down as CEO in 1979 helped)

I’ve never seen any suggesting GM had interest in the Deming Methods or even the inclination things were completely broken there.

To be fair, some of the over-coddled boomers were at least junior executives at the automakers by this time. Many may have had newly minted MBAs from business schools where cars were just like pickles or toasters: a product to be sold at the lowest price to the greatest number of suckers.

I remember a Pontiac J-body from this period that had switchgear that looked and felt like Tupperware lids. They sold out GM’s long-term future for short-term profits, never understanding that better desogn and materials could lead to repeat business.

I will always be fond of these first-gen Luminas because I passed my driver’s test in one. To be honest, I think it looks better than the second generation.

I drive a W-body every day, and before this I owned a Taurus and a Tbird. The Thunderchicken was a tub, but a pleasant one. The Taurus had a nicer ride but was a bit dainty. In all the time I’ve owed this Regal I’ve never had suspension work or a brake overhaul. The Taurus (was a 92) needed that kind of attention all the time.

The Lumina coupe never sold that well relative to the sedan (e.g., in 1991 roughly 36,000 were produced versus 160,000 for the sedan). Only when the coupe’s name was changed to Monte Carlo in 1995 did sales take off — production reached 93,000. That was still quite a bit less than the 1995 Lumina’s 242,000 but not much lower than the T-Bird’s 115,000.

Note that the second-generation Lumina/Monte Carlo combo didn’t sell all that badly through 1998, when roughly 278,000 were produced. This was meaningfully lower than the Taurus’ 400,000, but GM had three other brands with mid-sized offerings.

That said, despite GM’s huge investment in the W-bodies they didn’t always sell as well as their predecessors, which Buick and Oldsmobile continued to offer through 1996 as entry-level models. That year the old-hat Century sedan outsold the entire W-bodied Regal range even though the latter also had a coupe and a wider range of models. The same was true of the Cutlass Ciera versus the Cutlass Supreme.

Well I have no idea who if anyone in particular was responsible for the GM10 program, most likely a committee and ideas were passed around. However, once the project was greenlighted, especially after the 1984 reorganization, the program was largely oversaw by Lloyd Reuss.

The coupes were released first because the RWD G-body platform was the oldest and GM had committed to go FWD as soon as possible. Back in the early mid 80s when the models were planned, coupes were still going strong. Since by 1988, there were no RWD sedans except for the Cutlass Supreme sedan, the A bodies were filling that role.

The A-bodies were slated to be replaced by the W sedans but the A-bodies were to be retained if sales still continued strong (and they mostly did). That is why by he 1997 redesign, there was a Buick Century and Buick Regal that were virtually identical except for trim and engine.

What GM and Ford, to a lesser extent, others failed to see that coupes, especially larger coupes began to drop in sales fairly rapidly.

The biggest thing I can describe about the GM10 platform, and GM in general, maybe because of their size, is that usually whenever they bet, they bet big. Ford has done this, as well as Chrysler, on a smaller scale. Most of the biggest GM programs, Vega, Citation, J cars, W cars, Epsilon, were huge bets. Ford had the Mustang, the Pinto, the Taurus, F150, some of which met with bigger success. Chrysler bet the farm on the K cars and the minivans and in the early 90s the LH platform. Now the LX platform is underpinning most larger Chrysler products.

That is probably the biggest difference I see between the domestics and the Japanese, even the Europeans. Rarely do you see such radical change in models, especially on such a grand scale. It is no secret that the Honda Accord was largely the same mechanically and structurally (even if the body changed) from 1982-1997. Toyota managed to get by on basically two chassis (Camry, Corolla) and 2-3 engines for 20 years.

I remember reading an article in a car mag when the 3.4 DOHC was being introduced to compete with the SHO. The article was all over the fact that it made so much more power than the 3.1 but then they said that GM was not going to offer it in the police version. The reason, it did not meet the durability standards for police use. But hey we don’t have a problem sticking the public with a engine we know doesn’t pass a reasonable durability test.

One problems with the 3.4, along with others, was that the other cars that it was going to be used in never came to be, it was designed to be used in the FWD GM80 F-body and as the high performance engine for the the 2nd gen Fiero. It was supposed to make up to 270hp in the highest performance versions.

We thought that GM was going to pull a Ford and run a new FWD model alongside the RWD model ala Probe. I used to work with a guy in the late 1990s who was part of the Fiero program and thats all he would talk about. Even had an Entera Vipre.

Ironically, another guy that I worked with who was affiliated with the Buick Regal GN/GNX project, had a Lumina Z34 coupe with one of the ultra rare 5 speed manual transmissions.

I have not seen anything on durability for police use, but knowing generally how that process works, probably had more to do with parts and maintenance prices. Fleets like simple and cheap which is often at odds with the rest of the public. I am sure, even if the engine was as reliable as anything on the road, probably would have given fleet mechanics fits to deal with.

I test-drove (or, rather, was the test-passenger) in a Z34 with the 5-speed manual tranny. The salesman was certified crazy, and actually scared me more than once during the test drive. Drove right off the side of a perfectly good freeway onramp, on about a 30 degree crushed rock surface (to prove . . . er, I’m still not sure what to this day). Then took a S-curve offramp a few miles down at 60 mph, waiting until exactly 123 feet from the stop sign at the end to fully engage the antilock brakes (something ached in my chest for a few days afterwards), but we actually did make the sign!

At the time I was really surprized to see the 5-speed manual, but had no idea how rare they really were.

No way I would have bought one due to the maintenance nightmare (outlined below) of the 3.4l. Same deal with the Thunderbird Super Coupe and the 300ZX twin-turbo that I also looked at around the same time. So much stuff, in such a tight space . . . when you only see short glimpses of the plug wires, and no signs at all of the actual plugs themselves, not to mention where the plug wires originate, you know it’s going to be a !@#$#$& to work on!

C’mon Eric…what could possibly go wrong with an interference engine that looks like this? Imagine monkeying with that greasy crap with maybe 2 inches clearance between it and the RH shock tower.. I wonder how long those plastic idler pulleys last….

Even worse was the 5-speed Z34 that came into the shop with a bad alternator. They put the car on the lift and could barely even see the alternator it was so hidden. The shop called the GM dealer who said you gotta drop the frame…

While keeping in mind how long GM alternators typically last, here are the alternator removal steps taken straight out of the service manual:

I dont think these are interference engines, I lost a timing belt on a 93 Grand Prix and it didnt crash, the belt change interval is 60K, not 60K and 1, 60. Mine went like a hundred or so miles after 60K.

Try doing the same thing on a V6 Honda… Or a Mitsubishi 3000GT or a Nissan 300ZX Turbo. Back in 2009, we had a customer with a 1997 Honda Accord V6 that one of the timing tensioner pistons froze and tore through the belt. After looking at nearly $500 in parts plus another $400 in labor for a motor with 178K he decided to buy a used motor with 55K on it for $700 and same $400 labor dropped it in. 12m/12k warranty.

You have a choice, you can either keep up with the times and offer advanced motors or offer old fashioned but easy to service and generally reliable motors and risk being branded dodgy.

It must have been absolute crap, Why you ask? Well its like this the Export Chevrolet Lumina that the world buys is not this FWD turd but a rebadged Holden Commodore from Australia so while Chevy decided these were good enough for US consumption export markets got a completely different car.

I found very interesting the contrast between California and the East coast… Florida, Kentucky, and the Northeast where I spent my time in those years were literally chock full of these cars. They were always stocked to the gills, everyone bought them, in KY especially. Being “Chevy Country”. You either owned a Z71 pickup or a Lumina or both. I always liked this generation of Grand Prix much better, the styling was better and the interiors too, the Chevy versions always seemed cheap.

I did almost buy a Lumina Euro sedan once, had it for an extended test drive, when I had “Days of Thunder” on my mind. The dash/steering layout was very unique, it gave the feel of an extremely low cowl, and notice how far the steering column juts out from the dash? That was different from most other cars, and made the cabin feel very airy, it was too much for my tastes then, I liked wrap-around cockpit styling, but I can see why bigger people would find it more roomy.

My kids were born in the early ’90’s (California) and I saw a lot of family cars in school parking lots and carpool dropoffs. Sure there were lots of Toyotas and Hondas. But there were a lot of American cars too. SUV’s and minivans, of course … Explorer, Suburban, Tahoe, and Caravan; but also Taurus and Sable, Contours and Escorts. Even a few Achievas and Auroras. But no W bodies. Not one. Oh, one family had a Chevy Venture minivan. I’d never seen one or even recognized the name.

I really disliked these when they came out, but now I find them rather handsome, if uninspired. I especially like the coupe, which to me looks a lot like a slightly bigger, better-proportioned Beretta.

For me, the Beretta was an even bigger Deadly Sin. It was supposed to be a 57 Chevy Bel Air for the 80s, a future classic that would attract young buyers and be real competition for Celicas, Preludes, GTIs and the like. Instead they were awkward and weird and repelled buyers like they were copies of Van Halen III.

Actually the Beretta probably sold more than the Celica, Prelude, GTi, individually at least. The market for coupes like this was only so large. Total Beretta production 88-96 was around 930K while total Prelude production during that exact period was 259K, VW sells about 1,500 GTIs a month now. As for Celicas, I have no idea, but considering the Corolla and Camry constituted the vast majority of Toyota sales I roughly figured Toyota sold about 56,000 Celicas in 1988. Of course none of these cars exist anymore because the market for them is gone.

Beretta did well, for a couple of years, with ‘kids’ along with Grand Ams. But, it was unchanged for a decade. In the trendy coupe segment, styling is dated after 2-3 years. Sales tanked after 1992 and were also rans until finally dying off in 1996.

My mother bought one of these horrid collections of parts in 1993. I recall that she actually got 95k out of the rear tires – they were only replaced due to dry rotting and still had their factory tread almost fully intact. Suck on that, Impala! (a la Impala’s infamous rear suspension that eats tires and launches class action law suits). Gutless wonder of an engine with the most awful brakes. But it still managed to get about 33-35mpg on long trips. The gigantically wide dash had three gauges – speed, gas, and temp. An old fashioned odometer looked horribly out of place in the otherwise minimalist design like they didn’t even try. The speedometer from day one would periodically quit and spring back to life once slapped on the dash above. The mechanical vacuum pushbutton AC controls were tiny and hard to read in low light. The column shift was disturbingly long and had to be maneuvered around to get to the radio controls. A very strange ergonomic design.

Oh yes, and when entering the car don’t forget to pull your head backward lest you be hit from the four-door’s trailing upper corner swinging you into the face painfully reminding how styling trumped function. The door handle was so far forward this was a common occurrance. They had some sort of forward-bending arc to the shape of the door frame.

And then there was the twisted masochism of the “passive” seat belt design mounted to the door that qualified as an alternative to air bags in 1993 federal safety law. And much cheaper than mouse-trap motorized seat belts that the imports were using at the time. The idea was to leave the seat belt plugged in all the time and slip in between the two portions of belt as you entered the car. Not so easy to do in practice even for the limberest teenager. You invariably got tangled in a jungle of webbing that made you unplug the seatbelt anyway.

I borrowed it for a two week span in 1995 and learned to despise that hideous creature. On a cloverleaf interchange doing 25 mph the tires would squeal horribly and hold on for dear life while the body wollowed dove and porpised with any aberration in the road. Oh that suspension was awful. It had zero handling characteristics but at the same time you felt every bump in the road. How is that even possible? It’s like the front end was three times heavier than its suspension was tuned to balance. Speed bumps made the car completely loose its concept of gravity. And brakes….what brakes? They were successful in making the nose dive and the tail go high in the air but as far as stopping the car they didn’t do quite the job in panic maneuvers. Normal braking invariably turned into panic stomping on the pedal as you never felt the car was going to do what you told it. Acceleration was leisurely at best with only 3.1L at tap. You’d be hard pressed to outrun a 3-cylinder Metro. Gawd what an awful machine.

These rolling atrocities were the definitive proof that the grey-haired WASP males what ran GM at the time were totally out of touch with reality. They simply convinced themselves, “if we build it, they will buy it,” which their absurd sales projections show.

There is no way they could have even driven any of their competition to benchmark their design. Compared to a ’68 Chevelle, the Lumina was a good design, but history has shown us that buyers, having been contaminated by poisoned water, bought Camacords instead.

The featured car is in very good shape, but oh for the love of God, what an awkward design! Squared-off wheel openings on a car with “aero” pretensions is not the best look, and that may be the single ugliest rear spoiler ever; from the side it look like the trunk has been left ajar.

Cars like this and the Impala from today make me nostalgic for the Colonnades which in retrospect, and comparison, were loaded with personality and nice driving feel. Back in the 70s I’m sure no one thought they would be collectable.

I suppose the same could be said for the Lumina and that in 10 years time they will be sought after by someone, just not me. I believe the survival rates will be lower than for the Colonnades and of course there were fewer built. But still…

The “problem” with the Colonnades is that they are always compared to the higher standards of today’s buyers. Back in the day, they sold well, and were ahead of the competition in many ways. It was a tough time for the automakers with all of the safety and pollution mandates. Most vehicles then were absolutely horrid, with zero power, performance, handling, or looks. While they do not have great space utilization, and their (over)styling isn’t everybodies cup of tea, there were some bright spots. The chassis was a drastic improvement over their predecessors and peers. With few modifications, it was used right upto 1996. It was simple, durable, and cheap to obtain replacement parts. The ride and handling are notable. The aftermarket has embraced them, as it is easy to build a corner carver right from a catalog. Unlike the Luminas(and most GM cars from the ’80’s to present), many of the Colonnades have personality, and I know a few people that have fond memories of them.

My brother in law had the first generation Cutlass version of this car.
A vehicle that he actually won by being the top sales person of the year at his company. I thought the Cutlass rather boring ,except for the oddly placed door handles. The first time I went to open the door on the car there was nothing there!. I can’t give you specifics, but the Cutlass must have been as bad as Lumina , because my notoriously cheap brother in law didn’t keep the car but 5 years or so.

My dad had a first year Lumina Euro 3.1 sedan, which I thought was really cool back then. At least, it was way cooler than the Corsica it replaced. The growly exhaust note gave the impression that it was fast, and I was very disappointed to learn years later that the mean sounding V6 made all of 135 ponies. He seemed to like it, although I know it had a ton of problems… probably the most of any new car I can remember him having. Granted, my dad is known for abusing the shit out of cars and I know he killed at least one engine in the Lumina by never changing the oil, and that the dealership refused to replace it under warranty so he ended up having to trade in our little fiberglass boat to a mechanic for a replacement.

While he owned it, we took a family vacation to California (only time I’ve ever been west of Buffalo) and my parents rented a base model Lumina. The non-Euro version seemed so much more bland to me – but that was such a great trip and to this day any time I see a Lumina I think of smelling the Pacific Ocean and the scenery along 17-Mile Drive.

I completely agree with the Deadly Sin status for these, but I actually do like a lot of things about the early W-Body cars. IMO, the Lumina was probably the weakest of them, while the ’88-’90 Oldsmobiles were my favorite. These were cars that could have – and should have – been good, but cost-cutting and various other factors made them end up wholly average and unimpressive. Ford had set the standard with the 1986 Taurus and that’s what GM was still aiming at in the early 90’s when Honda, Nissan and Toyota were all really raising the bar for midsize sedans.

Still, I like them because there were plenty of thoughtful, unique features and styling touches, and the typical General Motors myriad of machinery available (I’d love to have a Quad4/5-speed Cutlass Supreme) that survived the cost-cutting chopping block. The ’95 refresh of the Lumina seemed like GM conceding that they would never be able to compete with the imports in this segment and were content to live on fleet sales and loyalist diehards. In their typical way they threw all the ambitious design elements of the early W-bodies in the trash and sold a sad, sedate car for people who lamented the loss of bench seats. Twin-cam engines with lofty redlines were replaced by Dale Earnhardt Intimidator #3 Fuck Yeah ‘Merica Wal-Mart Monte Carlos (maybe the saddest American car that has ever existed) and for the latter half of the 90’s, Chevrolet didn’t even pretend to try and compete with the Camry or Accord.

We really need to get some insiders to spill their guts about the who, what, how and why atrocities like the 10-cars got designed and approved for production. Why the god-awful seat belt design—was it a case of “we must use whatever we invent”? GM had stylists who could turn out beautiful designs–so exactly how did the camel-for-a-horse decisions get made? I really doubt Roger Smith got involved in trivia such as exterior door handle design, so what is the internal history of that bizarre and dysfunctional mechanism? We know GM had Proving Ground testing—so what did the internal analyses and durability tests reveal? Did the thirteenth floor have NO ONE with the integrity to speak up for the customer’s interests?

Well it was a case of having to have some sort of passive restraint but airbags still being to expensive, much less dual airbags, GM started to put airbags in Cadlillacs and the Corvette first, later they started to filter down through the line up.

I found the GM ones the least annoying of them beside airbags, the Japanese “electric cigarette remover” was much more of a pain in the ass.

Many cars used the “mad mouse” or the powered shoulder seatbelt, they were awful. I remember plenty of Ford, Nissan and Toyota cars with this set up. My old 1990 Topaz was the worst. When the mechanism failed, it failed at the worst point, fully forward. At least with the GM cars, you could unbuckle the thing to get in and out.

Chuck Jordan, head of GM styling in the late 80’s brought up the fact that the Luminas shape, believe it or not, had been pretty much completed in 1982, it was going to be Chevrolets H-body FWD large sedan, hence the really conservative dash, 6 across tailights ala Caprice Classic. Chevrolet punched out of the H-body when full size sales started to rebound and the Luminas design was passed on to the W-body, but it was larger than the rest of the 1988 GM10’s (in another “why GM?” move) so it ended being delayed, again and Chevrolet soldiered on with the1982 vintage Celebrity for another couple of years before the Lumina finally came out.

For the record, a friend of mine had one of these that went an amazing 385,000 miles before the timing chain broke and he decided to just get a new car.

Everyone thought the Caprice was done after the 1990 model year it was a bit of a surprise when word got out that there was a new Caprice in the works. GM had the capacity so they ran the car until they jettisoned it in 1996 for the SUVs. But the bigger surprise was that the Lumina was the only midsize the change its name. It was supposed to be a Celebrity but who knows maybe Lumina was the original large car size name.

Back in 1991, GM announced they were going to close either Arlington or Ypsilanti both of which built RWD chassis. Well someone decided to have a contest between the plants so for about 9 months it was a build a thon. The consequence for the customer was exceptionally built cars during that time. Everyone expected GM to close Arlington but Arlington won because the UAW offered a sweetheart deal that made GM take a second look. Afterwards Ypsilanti sued and wanted their tax incentives back among other things.

As far as mileage, I am not surprised taken care of properly the GM 60*V6 family is sturdy and reliable along with the Buick 3800.

FWIW, I’ve known several folks who have owned these over the years. For these people, they turned out to be relatively good cars, relative to their ability to repair them. Not that they were incredibly unreliable, but the folks I know who owned these were usually second, third or even fourth owners. After a certain point for certain owners, even a Rolls Royce costs too much to repair.

When they first were released, I really didn’t care for them, but over the years they’ve grown on me. I never spent much time with them even when I was selling Chevys (in the early 90’s) but experiencing them later did bring about an appreciation. Living in rural Georgia, pickup trucks were king and our Chevy outlet sold tons of them. Even the Toyota store where I normally worked sold more pickups and FourRunners than cars.

I never thought it about it much when selling them, but the low, low beltline and airy interior rivaled any contemporary Honda of the time. The car was plenty roomy and the trunk seemed huge. It also had a pretty low lift over trunk, something that could not be said for its domestic competition

The strip speedometer and lack of standard gauges, not so much. You got more when you moved up to a Pontiac or Oldsmobile W-body. My favorite was the Cutlass Supreme International Series with the 3.4 DOHC motor; that thing was a Rocket (pun intended). The 3.1 Lumina was a stone. Unfortunately, they continued the whole questionable “Euro” badging from the Celebrity onto the Lumina, but I thought the Euro Luminas were better looking than the standard ones. Too bad the 3.1 didn’t deliver any kind of “Euro” performance. The “sawtooth” wheels were nice, though…

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I’ve known folks who have had Luminas go 300K+ miles. One is a good friend of mine. By the time his 1990 or 1991 (I forget) Lumina gave up the ghost, it was at least 19 years old and a rusty pile here in the upper midwest. It managed to outlive a whole raft of competitors, though as there are virtually none of it’s contemporary competitors plying the roads of Southwest Michigan.

Truly, the Lumina should have been better, but to me it had the same effect that the 1996 Taurus did: A nice car on paper that should have done well, but absolutely did not resonate with the public. The 1989-1992 Taurus just creamed this thing and along with Toyota and Honda really ramping up the competition about this same time period, there was not a whole lot GM could have done to make the car more palatable.

Too bad the name is so tarnished here in North America, in other parts of the world, the Lumina is the name attached to the current-day SS model here. It would have made an excellent name for a range topping model.

Back when I was a newly minted engineer I was working for a little automation company tasked with making a parts handling system for the Lumina drum brake spring. Unlike conventional brakes, the Lumina used a horseshoe shaped single spring instead of a pair of coil springs to retract the shoes.

The design manager had a brilliant idea that we would use magnets to lift a batch of springs onto the rack, then an air cylinder to push them off the magnets. Unfortunately he violated one of the prime rules of material handling, which is that using any natural force like gravity or magnetism only works MOST of the time and cannot be blindly trusted.

It was a disaster. The springs wouldn’t nest nicely on the magnet banks, some of them would decide that no, they didn’t really want to stick to the magnets and fall off. Once the pusher forced them off onto the storage racks some of the springs would decide that yes, actually they REALLY liked the magnets and go back with them to foul up the next pickup cycle.

Startup was problematic,with weeks of fooling around to try and make it right. Worst of all, GM caught wind of our problems and decided that magnetizing brake parts was a bad idea and forbade the supplier to use the system.

As it turned out it wasn’t that big a deal, since they needed much fewer parts than they expected but the parts plant where this happened now sits empty and for sale. Me, I never owned a Lumina or had to repair the brakes on one but that lesson has come in handy a few times during my career…

Working in an engineering organization as I do, I appreciate such “war stories.” BTW, I recommend the cable show “How It’s Made” for good examples of how manufacturing engineering & materials handling problems are solved.

Every 1990-1994 vintage Lunina had 4 wheel disk brakes that I have ever worked on. The 1995 went back to rear drums for all models and then on base only there after so this must be for those newer versions as all the old ones used disks.

I once lusted after the a white Z34 coupe. At the time I had an 89 GP SE/5 speed.
The GP was ok, but traded on a 90 Mclaren/ASC Grand Prix turbo coupe…which I still miss dearly. It was a great car for 110K miles until its untimely demise.
I later had a 96 GP coupe. It actually had brakes that worked, but the 3100 series V6 was underwhelming, seemed slower than the earlier 2.8 and 3.1

I dumped the last GP for a T/A. Another story for another time I guess

My wife has an 08 GP. It has been completely and absolutely reliabe for 80K miles and consistantly gets 25+mpg. It is quite a bit more refined than the early w-body, but after having owned 3 early ones and this last gen one, it is still easy to tell that I’m driving one after a few miles. To me that chassis has a few unique ride and handling characteristcs that never went away.

That’s it…that bright red-orange! I love it, and I was seriously attracted to these when they first came out.

If it weren’t due to the fact they were more expensive than I could afford at the time, we may have bought one instead of our beloved Acclaim.

In 1990, when searching for a new car, I looked beyond “sportiness” and cared more for ergonmoics.

My good points on the Lumina:

1. Outward visibility due to the low beltline – I found that quite attractive.
2. That bright color. Really.

My deal-killers:

1. The dashboard – who designed this thing?
2. Door-mounted seatbelts.
3. My continual anger at GM for screwing up the greatest cars on earth many years before.

Chrysler won out after a year of research and fond memories of dad’s gray 1950 Plymouth.

The winner? Our 1990 gray (dark quartz) Plymouth Acclaim! ( yes, Mr. Bennett – I owe you a photo as soon as I can find one and scan it and post it ! )

Time has proven that we made the right choice.

PS: Paul; If these were the rental queens you say they were, how come at every Hertz I rented from back then stuck me with a Topaz or Tempo? Awful excuses for cars. Not a Lumina in sight, either – Hertz was all Ford back then, or nearly so…

I liked, the Acclaim and was rooting for Plymouth, yet I had rented / loved a Dodge Spirit and It was peppy with the v6 engine. the market was filled with choices that were interesting at the time.
if you cross shopped a Lumina with a Dodge Spirit Only, Vs Fords Tempo… I’d pick a Dodge Spirit. too. but there were more interesting 2 doors which at the time i favored. i never liked the name Lumina, it sounds like a dim bulb ,dim wattage.not too bright…
does not seem beyond dimming out, road failure.

At the time my sort of in laws had a Lumina which …had replaced a Celebrity ,which had replaced a caprice…

I remember thinking LET Down from the CELEBRITY if that’s where they started.
there seem to be few survivors of a 200k a year run in the early 90s.

I think that Roger was largely right about the fact that his existing customers would keep coming back. GM had some very loyal customers. Buick was on a roll in the 90s with a lot of longtime GM owners buying Buicks. Longtime GM folks were fairly satisfied with the cars of the 80s and 90s and indeed kept coming back, because they were not out there comparing. Eventually, though, a few here and a few there starts to add up, and someone in their circle of acquaintances shows up in an Avalon or in an Acura TL, and they start to wonder. I used to work with one such guy who was ready to replace his wife’s LeSabre with another. He really planned to do this, but planned to lease. Because of the fabulous resale values, an Avalon would be a lower monthly payment. They chose the Avalon and there has not been another GM car in the driveway since.

Also, young buyers had far more exposure to non-GM iron and stayed away in droves. Chrysler had this same problem through the 70s – few conquest sales, plus old regulars being turned off by bad quality or unappealing cars. It was new product that appealed to people that reversed the trend. GM has not really turned that corner, from where I sit.

jpcavanagh is right on here. Even in the dark days of the ’80s and ’90s, GM was extremely good at making cars that longtime GM buyers wanted to buy. Trouble was, that was an aging and shrinking demographic, and execs didn’t seem too worried since the consequences would come beyond their tenure.

Even today’s GM, with its much improved lineup, seems to align its aspirational products to buyers with an existing GM nostalgia (Camaro, Corvette, XTS, top-trim GMT900s, etc) more often than it courts brand converts. Not that there aren’t exceptions elsewhere (eg Volt, Cruze). This is coming from someone with significant GM nostalgia who grew up in a ‘GM family’.

You make an excellent point about how GMs new stuff appeals a lot to GMs traditional buyers. It only now occurs to me that Chrysler did the opposite. From Iaccoca forward, their new stuff did not really appeal all that much to those of us who really loved the older stuff. But the new models appealed to a whole new demographic. They have been amazingly consistent in their ability to do this right to the present day. Hindsight confirms that the risk of alienating the old Newport buyer was well worth it (and very necessary). There is a lesson here for GM, if someone will see it.

There is nothing wrong with making things existing buyers want. With any product you face two choices, make for what you know and make for something new. A good company has a blend of both. A $ is a $ and if someone wants it they will buy it. Problems arise when you both turn off your existing customer base AND do not attract new ones. That, IMO, is what happened to Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Pontiac, and other brands recently and in the past.

GM is not alone in designing cars for a traditional buyer group, Volvo kept going on the fumes of basically two looks (140 and 740/850) for 35 years until the S60 came out in 2000. VW did the same with the one trick pony Beetle and Rabbit/Golf and hit a low point in the early 1990s and almost died off in the US until the third generation Golf/Jettas came out. Correct me if I am wrong but the New Beetle resembling the old one happened by accident? That it is no coincidence that nearly 25% of New Beetle owners over the age of 50 used to drive one of the old ones?

Actually I dare say that GM has probably been more radical in altering its product during a redesign than on average in the automotive business as a whole and probably paid the price for it to some degree. Being the largest automaker in the US historically GM was always looked upon for acceptance of larger trends. Sure, some individual cars came out from the other car makers that defined markets but they were usually on a smaller scale and not very often. Someone (Carmine?) brought up a good point that during the late 70s, many in the government and in the auto industry looked to GM to make the trend for downsizing and the wholesale switch to FWD so that both the other automakers and the public would accept it.

Chrysler going wholesale radical FWD in the 1980s was born largely out of necessity rather than by choice. By the time Iacocca took over in late 1978, Chrysler really only had two things going for it looking towards the future. The Omni/Horizon L-cars that had come out for the 1978 model year and were hits, and the K-cars that were in the development stage. Except for the newly refreshed (of an old platform) R-body cars for 1979, all of Chryslers RWD vehicles were aging and they did not have the money to invest in updating them, with the trend toward FWD (in the mass market anyways) being the accepted philosophy of the day. Iacocca decided to massage them to make it through until all of the FWDs percolated and they were all dropped. Chrysler’s switch from RWD to FWD was as dramatic as anything has ever happened in the history of the automobile during the early years of the 80s, it had to be or Chrysler would have ceased to exist. BUT, instead of making cars that looking like little spaceships that were about to depart earth, Chrysler’s cars, until the 1993 debut of the LH cars (Intrepid, Concorde, Vision) were noted for their extreme conservativeness despite their FWD packaging. As late as 1995, you could buy a Chrysler LeBaron with pentastar hood ornament, vinyl top, pillow velour seats, and wire wheel covers that looked alot like a small version of the original 1977 LeBaron. That, in a way, probably helped lesson the blow of the loss of the older models, and probably kept many of Chrysler’s customers while acknowledging the necessity of moving forward on space and fuel economy.

Japanese and European cars have not been known for being particularly radical in their design changes. As I have said before, they tend to be overall more conservative, especially the Europeans, and especially so the father you get up the economic ladder. The Lexus LS flagship models has had basically three general body designs and two engines in 22 years of existance. The vaunted S class Mercedes I do not thinkn a single body panel was changed from 1979-1991 except for the headlight assemblies.

Every brand has their loyalists and the first rule of any business is not to alienate the customers you already have while gently moving products along to meet the times and changing conditions. This has been discussed to no end in my family over the years as my uncle’s father owned an Oldsmobile franchise from 1966-1996, and always believed that the beginning of the end for Oldsmobile was when the new Cutlasses came out in 1988. Yes, the Brougham-tastic G-body coupes and A-body sedans and 88/98 were not going to last forever, but when you bite the gift horse that feeds you it tends to get angry.

I wonder what would happen if Mercedes designed a 4 door sedan WITHOUT a fixed quarter window in the rear door? That little design trademark has been a hallmark of design since the 1950s. Same with BMWs kidney bean grille (although I think its largely been Bangledized now…) and of course Volvo’s diagonal bar across the grille.

People IDENTIFY with their cars, when you alter the design and cut the links between people and car they will be adrift. The moral of this post? I tend to think that GM has been TOO radical in their designs probably because as the lead automaker for most of automotive’s history, they were always looked upon as the maker that had to do the big stuff. The rest were content to building cars that served small purposes. By the mid 1990s, all the historic buyers of GMs divisions who KNEW what their cars were supposed to be were lost.

That ironically, is the complete opposite of what has happened in the truck world. In February 2013, Toyota sold 63,xxx Camrys for the month, but Ford sold over 94,xxx F150s and GM sold nearly 105K of the Silverados and Sierras combined. The passenger truck market is about 52% of passenger vehicles sales right now and the domestic brand control about 85% of it – there is a reason because nobody does brawn like the big boys.

Overall, though, any learned person and student of history (even thoughs that don’t care for cars) would probably agree that US domination of any large industry was probably going to come to and end sooner or later. We talk about the hey day of the Big 3 in the US during the 50s and 60s but there was a reason for that. Not just because the had better cars, but because they were the only ones making cars. Funny thing about WWII, during a lot of the Cold War, the US was the only major economic power in the free world, and the nascent automotive industry in Europe and in Asian had its hands full rebuilding their economies and trying to make cars for their own people first. It wasn’t until the European and Japanese economies reached competitive levels in the 60s and 70s that they were able to compete on global scale. Of course in today’s global economy, the lines between domestic and import have been blurred. No wonder why most of the product that Honda and Toyota sells is made in the US. So the Big 3s fall from 90% of the market to 50% of the market should really be of nose surprise, and has been brought on not just in product design but a confluence of various events domestic and worldwide.

Many good points. And I agree that one of GM’s mistakes has been to vacillate too wildly between being trying to be leading edge and conservative. There are numerous examples of this, but just one comes to mind: the “dustbuster” minivans. They way overshot that market segment, and then flipped to the other extreme in their successors.

Of course, there are so many other factors. Import cars became increasingly the status brands to have, at least on the coasts. Even if the Lumina had been as good as the Taurus, I really doubt Chevy could have sold them in CA in the early 90’s. Too many things had already happened up to that point.

There were so many challenges that the Big Three faced starting in the seventies, and it may not have been possible to really master them all. But I do hold up Ford in the eighties as an example of how attention to the product and its execution (far from consistent, but some good efforts) proved that it was and is always the winning strategy. I saw Ford heading the right way then, before they lost it again. So management ultimately is the final key determinant. And GM’s management was lacking in too many areas, including their endless efforts to be both progressive and conservative at the same time.

jpcavanaugh

Posted March 5, 2013 at 9:03 AM

Craig, you raise some good points. But one thing is plain: GM’s market share was 45% as recently as the early 80s, down only slightly from the over 50% enjoyed 20 years earlier. Most of the early import onslaught hit Ford and Chrysler much harder. But GM got fat and insular. Their buyers were extremely loyal, and for good reason. For a long time, they built excellent cars and trucks. But since the 80s, GM’s share has plummeted far in excess of the losses experienced by their domestic rivals. Chrysler is in 2013 at roughly the same share it had in 1962 (admittedly a bad year for them).

GM got spoiled by its loyal customers, and because there were so many of them, it of course did not make sense to alienate any of them. Then. But when the pool continues to shrink, you cannot keep focusing on the same old men and women, because every one of them will eventually buy a last car. How many people go to the Ponderosa Steak House any more? (if it still even exists).

Chrysler also had a loyal buyer pool, but it eventually got small enough that it could not sustain a healthy company. Chrysler got busy and made changes. I am not talking fwd vs. rwd. I am talking appeal and features. I owned an 89 Cadillac Brougham. Everything on the car worked just like it did in 1969. The trunk release only worked when the key was on. There was no keyless entry. There was no one-touch window roll-down. And on and on. On one of their best and most expensive cars, mind you. All of these things were on a Taurus by then.

I have often read that GM’s problem was that as the 90s went on, it alienated traditional customers but did not appeal to new ones. That is a fail. The problem is not that they put off the old customers. The problem was that the new cars were just not that appealing. Had they been, those old customers would have come back and gotten used to them. Chrysler undoubtedly alienated a lot of old time customers with the minivans. I knew one old Mopar guy who couldn’t get over how cheapened the new 96 minivan was compared to his version from the late 80s. But to the rest of the world who had not been driving Chryslers for 30 years, they were fabulous.

GM’s problem was one of insularity and entitlement. Delorean’s book chronicled it in the 60s and 70s. I have also read the lengthy memo that Elmer Johnson wrote around the time he quit in the late 80s GM management was disintegrating, and its managers were increasingly stuck in a system that walled them off from the outside world. There was the GM way, and it produced GM cars. It was good enough in 1975, but it was not good enough in 1995 or 2005. I hope that they can come out of it, but I am not sure that they will. Both Chrysler and Ford have been through significant, even wrenching, organizational and personnel changes in the last ten years. GM has had a parade of new faces at the top, but I see (from the outside) very little change down deep in the organization. I believe that there are a lot of good, talented people who are in a system that gets in the way of doing what ought to be done.

You probably hit that one on the head Paul. I came into the car world back when GM (and the Big 3) were still the dominate players and will retire when the Big 3 have 50% and GM about half that.

The two main factors that I see that have been the primary factors into getting us here are A) Globalization – as stated above with the US not being the only major free market economy there is bound to be intrusion in the market – it has occured not just with automobiles but in virtually everything else where capital expenditures are a huge part of the budget. TVs were once all US, then Japanese, and how almost exclusively Korean. All the Japanese consumer electronics companies are suffering now because of the rise of the Koreans. B) Energy regulations – this probably has been the biggest factor. The drive for fuel economy has been necessary but had the unintended consequence of forcing conformity in the design of automobiles. Up until the mid 1980s (when the Big 3 probably had their peak combined), domestic cars and imported cars looked signficantly different. Today much less so and that has given away a HUGE incentive for people to buy American. That also is evidenced by truck sales which have only recently been affected deeply by safety and efficiency standards that affected passenger cars. There is no question that part of the reason why the Big 3 are still kings of truck sales in the US because the are far less restrained in producing a product that is wholly distinctive and useful to that market. Cadillacs used to be king of the luxury car market because, they used to look like well…Cadillacs. No one mistakes an F150 today.

I do agree with the sociological argument, i.e. the coastal mentality. Of course that goes for many things anywhere. The coastal people, especially California, like to be different, non conformist, and feel like they operate on higher level thinking (even if they don’t) and well buying a bread and butter car that is popular with the masses in Middle America isn’t going to cut it. I suppose that is why most of the European exotic cars are more popular on the coasts than anywhere else, not just because of concentration of wealth but prestige is subjective. No one is going to dispute that exotic European cars are wonderful looking and driving machines…when they work…but they soldier on despite the extraordinarily high commitment they require of their owners.

(I may step into it a bit with this statement but understand the logic) One of the arguments that I used in supporting the bailout of GM and Chrysler a few years ago was the preservation of choice in the marketplace. A market full of dynamic and different products is better than a market of only a few basic ones. As good a product as they may be, I would hate to be stuck having to choose between a Hyundai Sonata, a Toyota Camry, or a Mercedes S class all decently built cars but rather uninspiring for someone with a car personality.

So it is no surprise that the three cars that I own and drive regularly are a 2010 Camaro SS, 93 Century Wagon (with wood), and a 2008 CTS. All very different cars but each a complete statement of personality of their own. The CTS sees most use as the basic midsize sedan that is reasonably efficient with the 3.6 V6 and fairly tight suspension, the wagon is for utility and the Camaro, well when indiscretion occasionally trumps good sense but has done wonders for keeping a marriage alive.

I tend to parry Paul’s statements on this and add one thing. GM, like AT&T in the phone world, and IBM in the electronics world, were behemoths like the world has never seen. (At least ones that were not heavily managed by the government). Some of that management insularity came from that, just like the federal government is dealing with now. Ford and Chrysler, even today, have largely been second string players in the world now dominated not just by GM but Toyota and Honda. Domestic automotible policy is generally still viewed through the GM lens with Toyota and Honda now constituting the Big Three in the US marketplace. Those three roughly have the same marketshare as GM, Ford, Chrysler did twenty five years ago.

I do not dispel that there was and is hubris at GM, such things exist in any organization when they reach a sufficient size and maturity in the market. Startups do well because they are small flexible and their original members have an edgy mindset. If anything, executive management of Toyota is ever more insular than GM ever was the executive ranks in Japan are still dominated by the family, only Ford (and to a much lesser extent), has any real influence from its original founders on the US side. The difference is in approach. Historically, the Japanese approach to car design has been basic and deliberate. They started small a grew, largely, and even to an extent today, relying heavily on the Camry and Corolla as the backbone of their existance. The cars evolved only slowly over time, never on a radical level, although they have improved markedly over time to the point that the 1992 Camry models felt reasonably substantial and not “dinky” which was a predominate viewpoint towards Asian brands for many years.

This was borne out during the recall events of the last severals years (and I am not going to comment on the recall itself just the management behavior) when the problem went from being a relatively small problem to a crisis that started to look like the Audi thing in the late 1980s. All of that culminated in the admission by Toyota Chief Akio Toyota that the corporate lost its way somewhat in its old philosophy of “Safety, Quality, Volume” and a memo circulated among senior management that was eerily reminiscent of the Ford Pinto memos of the 1970s.

The whole Toyota experience of 09-10 has been incorporated into many automotive management history courses now along with GM, and VW of the early 90s. In January, I was part of a seminar panel at the Wake Forest MBA program that discussed the VW case specifically. Toyota is now suffering from some of the same problems that had plagued GM, IBM, and other large market dominating organizations that have faced changing times.

Probably the biggest issue that I saw GM as having in the late 1970s and into the early 90s (when the money finally ran out) is that because they were so large and had so much money – management felt the need to throw money, big money, at everything. Some of the ideas were sound, moving to efficient FWD vehicles, robots, various other things, were ultimately necessary, but unlike smaller companies that had to rationalize ever dollar they spent, GM had the mindset they they could spend the problem away. The problem with that strategy is simply size control. There is no greater example of this than the W program that we are talking about. I cannot think of any private business organization on the planet that has spent $7 billion on anything. I do not think there is a corporation that exists in the world today that has the wherewithall to apporach a project of that magnitude. The examples are numerous. GM rightly recognize the value in upgrading their data processing systems, and just simply went out and bought EDS for $2.4 billion with less than desired results. So GM spent $20 billion dollars in the 1980s trying to drive technology but lost alot of their customers. Of course all of that came to an end by the early 1990s recession when GM ran out of money and car sales declined.

GM and Ford did well in the 1990s and early 00s on the strength of truck sales (primarily SUVs) making enormous profits. By the late 00s the automakers were in trouble again due primarily to the duopoly of the recession and the decline of SUVs (and renewed emphasis on fuel economy) brought on by the rise in worldwide energy prices. Both GM and Ford were caught with their pants down (granted Ford did not require loans) as their profits largely came from truck sales. Chrysler suffered from general bad product (but we covered that in other sections).

The biggest difference between GM, and to a lesser extent Ford, and to a lesser extent Chrysler (historically) and the Japanese and Europeans is that the domestics always tried to offer a broad range of vehicles. GMs sales, even today, are spread out among many models even if they are not an equal % source of profits. Toyota and Honda dominate the compact and midsize sedan markets in the US, and do well on the luxury sedan, but compete rather poorly outside of those markets.

I hope I’m not hunted down and shot for this but: I really enjoyed door mounted lap/shoulder belts. I’m rather petite for a guy at 5’7″ and 160; maybe that’s why I never found them to be especially inconvenient. It was really nice not to have to buckle your belt each time you got in to drive. I always always always wear my seat belt but there are occasional days when it takes me about 5 miles before I reach back to put it on. Laziness happens.

I bought a brand new Lumina Euro 3.1 in April 0f 1991 and I still have it today. This has been and still is a great car. My wife drives it every day and she says she gets a lot of compliments on it. I do not know where this guy says the Lumina has terrible gas mileage. For years we packed the luggage in the trunk, put the 2 kids in the back seat and drove 2000 miles one way to Houston, Texas. The first time I checked the mileage, I thought there had to be a mistake. Every time I checked it while on the road it came out the same. The mileage was 33 MPG.I have faithfully changed the oil and filter every 3000 miles, as I do all my vehicles. The only major problem with this car over the past22 years, was I had the transmission repaired twice. I love the styling and I believe the styling still looks great today. My verdict on the Chevy Lumina Euro 3.1 is a big thumbs up.

I bought a brand new Lumina Euro 3.1 in April 0f 1991 and I still have it today. This has been and still is a great car. My wife drives it every day and she says she gets a lot of compliments on it. I do not know where this guy says the Lumina has terrible gas mileage. For years we packed the luggage in the trunk, put the 2 kids in the back seat and drove 2000 miles one way to Houston, Texas. The first time I checked the mileage, I thought there had to be a mistake. Every time I checked it while on the road it came out the same. The mileage was 33 MPG.I have faithfully changed the oil and filter every 3000 miles, as I do all my vehicles. The only major problem with this car over the past22 years, was I had the transmission repaired twice. I love the styling and I believe the styling still looks great today. My verdict on the Chevy Lumina Euro 3.1 is a big thumbs up.

I have a 91 lumina I aquired. It is clean inside and out has some wear on tires. I think original white wall. It only has 83000 miles on it. Was sitting 2 years befor I picked it up. Anyone know what I could get for it ?

I eagerly awaited the z34 and bought a black one off the showroom floor as soon as they first came out. Now in many ways I loved it, it was plenty quick and comfortable. But the passenger door paint peeled quickly, the electronics completely failed at 30k, and then most awfully, that thing was NEVER aligned. Repeated trips to the dealer did nothing, until the right front axle assembly simply fell off while making a left turn. Can you imagine that?
Door mounted seat belts and no ABS either.
I liked the looks of the car and I wanted to love it so bad, but with GM in those days, no can do.

I remember the Lumina car. At the time, I thought it was more attractive than anything else offered by General Motors, certainly better than the Buick Regal. I found the 2 door more attractive than the Chevy Beretta.

We used to call the 3.1 “the cackler” and didn’t mean it as a compliment. In the small town in Minnesota where I went to highschool this was the h.s. car of choice circa 1998. I personally drove an ’88 Prelude Si with my nose in the air and a trail of rust behind me.

We used to call the 3.1 “the cackler” and didn’t mean it as a compliment. In the small town in Minnesota where I went to high school this was the h.s. car of choice circa 1998. I personally drove an ’88 Prelude Si with my nose in the air and a trail of rust behind me.

I was thinking about whether or not I consider this car a deadly sin when I realized that it was probably the car being promoted when it became an odd thing in my world to drive a GM sedan. As bad as the X-cars, A-cars, J-cars, etc…were, lots of people of all walks of life drove them. It was the same with the H-body Bonnevilles and LeSabres. There wasn’t anything suspect about having one as your company car, or perhaps buying one out of loyalty to GM and a belief that everyone was wrong about Detroit inferiority. That was the end though. In my college town, anyone who put one of these in their driveway was definitely an outlier. They weren’t traditional enough to sell to the aging customer base, and they were abandoned by anyone likely to have a kid in their household. Ever since these came out, having a GM sedan in one’s driveway has been a dead giveaway of being a government employee with fleet car.

If you squint a little, it looks very much like a 5/4 Accord of that year. The problems with this car (and the other GM 10s) were not the exterior styling. They were sleek and modern without being too blobby like the Taurus/Camry.

We looked at these when they came out in ’89. To 13 year old GM loyalist me, this NEW car seemed elderly and tired. There was nothing that spoke of quality or luxury inside. The mouse fuzz upholstery seemed cheap, especially compared with an Accord of the same year. The Dashboard had a narrow slit for the gauges. The car seemed cheap and floppy, and the doors slammed cheaply . . . I could go on and on. Dad ended up buying a Plymouth Sundance, which despite the total lack of respect it garnered from the automotive press, was an excellent car. Chrysler’s use of the K car meant that in Iacocca form, Chrysler could put money into things the buyer would notice, like better upholstery, lighted vanity mirrors, sound deadening, etc, and sell a very plush little car for a very reasonable price. You could cram incredibly large objects in the hatchback while still hiding valuables. It was an inspired design, unlike the Lumina. Plus, the Sundance was reliable.

Dad ended up later buying a ’95 Olds Cutlass Supreme, which had much better styling inside and out than the Lumina and felt like a much better car.

Some of Paul’s selections as Deadly Sins like the Toronado or 1st and 2nd Generation Sevilles I disagree or can quibble with, but the Lumina and GM10s really were deadly Sins. Unlike the Citation, which was a good idea poorly executed, these were – well, a LACK of an idea and mediocrely executed. I can see why GM thought that they would get 21% of market share; when you combine the outgoing A bodies plus G body sales in peak years, that would make sense.

What should they have done instead? A more youthful styling of the H body would probably have been the best idea. That would have cut costs by eliminating a lot of platform duplication. Those were the roomiest, most efficient best built GM cars of that era after some of the initial bugs had been worked out and could be made to handle quite well in the T Type/Bonneville versions. The extra room and power afforded by the H body would have been a clear competitive advantage over the Taurus, Accord, and Camry, and with eliminating one platform and economies of scale, GM could have figured out how to lower the price point.

I remember car shopping with my high school friend during the mid 90’s. We went to several Chevy dealers and found one with a used 1989 T-Bird base model and a 1990 2 door Lumina Euro in silver with the optional alloys and 16″ tires. Because it was the Euro model it had the 3.1 std and the optional 4 speed automatic.

We test drive both cars and found the Lumina much more entertaining. The exhaust burble, the sharper steering and handling. The quicker 0-40 performance. It even had a full gauge cluster. The T-Bird in comparison felt old, slow, heavy and more ponderous. The shifter was on the steering column and gauges were sparse. It’s 3.8 V6 also left us cold with an engine that apparently was already leaking anti-freeze from the heads as it was low when we got back from the test drive and smelled very strong with A/C running. And that was with 53K miles. The Lumina had 62K if I remember and drive perfectly. We did agree however that the Ford was better looking of the two cars.

He ended up with the Lumina and drove that car for 5 years after which he sold it to his parents because there 1988 Dodge Omni was falling apart. They had that car well into the 00’s after which I lost track of them because they were base folks and our base was slowly closed down a year before.

I find these Euro Lumina Z34 interesting and wouldn’t mind having one to play with. I have never driven one but I did have a rental Celebrity Euro from the previous generation, for a week.
This was to be one of those bucket list items. I was taking the family on a one week California vacation. It was 1986, we were flying to LA, renting a car (I asked Enterprise for the Euro Celebrity) and immediately setting of for San Francisco on the I-5. Sundown caught us north of LA and at one point soon after darkness set in I noticed that the car was slowing down dramatically even with my foot deeper into the gas. I can’t remember the speed the car was traveling at this point but I broke out in a cold sweat thinking there was something wrong with the car. I did not know about the Grapevine and at that moment I was cresting it. The Euro Celebrity, I later found out had a four cylinder engine. The return route to LA was a leisurely ride down the legendary Pacific Coast Highway. This was to be the highlight of the trip (for me). I was going to drive down this famous road in a “sports sedan”. Well disappointment number two was on its way. PCH was crowded with tourists in RVs and other cumbersome contrivances making any effort at spirited driving futile.

I love my 1991 Euro 3.1.. I’ve owned it 3 years and it has never let me down. It has 161K on it. The only thing I hate is the door cylinder’s freeze up and my car has had keys sticking out of the locks for most of the 3 years ive owned it.

Wow. I’ve always thought these looked okay on the outside. Before today, though,, I have NEVER seen the dash board of one. OMG how hideous. The W platform is okay. My ex bvought the last new 2003 grand Prix at our local dealer. My daughter is driving it now, a little worse for the wear and weird GM things happening to it. I call them GM things, but all newer cars seem to develop weird little maladies that are hard to figure out exactly. Too many electronics? IDK. Just a thing.